Most people, but granted not all people will, if they have unresolved issues with their past, head off to see a therapist to talk it all out and hopefully find some sort of closure, elusive though that often proves to be.
Not, Russian Doll‘s Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne, who created the series with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler) who finds herself a prisoner of time in season 2’s super loopy and immensely satisfying second season of a show which has never seemed keen to follow the rules.
If you recall in season 1 — SPOILERS AHEAD!!! — Nadia found herself in an endless Groundhog Day-esque loop on her 36th birthday where she keep reliving the same party over and over again only to die at the end and reawaken nanoseconds later right back where she started.
Suffused with a sensibility that embraced comin to grips with a flawed reality more than tied up with a beat bow reality, the first season of Russian Doll was happy to take an established, now well-used multiversal trope and push it to some fantastically original schemes, always staying gritty and grounded, a reflection of a character who’s fractured present reality reflected a past that could’ve done with a whole lot more consistency and love than it received.
While it ended with a resolution of sorts as she and fellow unwilling time loop dweller Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) were released from their chrono prison, at ease with themselves and glad to be able to move on with their lives, it’s clear as season 2 begins that Nadia is a long way from finding the kind of lasting peace she probably wouldn’t mind having.
Still, the raspy-voiced, quip-heavy Nadia, whose ways with words and frank honesty, which is always delivered not with malice but a rueful, self-knowing shake off the head, would most likely have chosen to to go see a therapist if she knew the alternative was to, well, go through the bendy-wendy, timey-wimey descent into the soul and her past that season offers up.
It’s near impossible to talk about exactly what form her unconventional therapy takes without throwing spoilers around like confetti at an ’80s wedding, but suffice to say, Nadia steps onto the 6622 subway train in New York City’s Astor Place station only to find herself hurtled back to the year of her birth, 1982.
What happens then is a whole lot of bug-eyed trippy as Nadia comes face-to-face with the lingering pain, grief and loss at the heart of her family, a web of great sadness that goes all the way back to the dark days of World War Two when her Jewish Hungarian grandmother Vera (Irén Bordán in 1868 and 1982 and Ilona McCrea in 1944) flees Hungary for America, leaving everything behind her.
Having barely escaped being transported to the Nazi death camps, Vera is scarred as you could well understand, which plays havoc with the sense of security and self of daughter Lenora (Chloë Sevigny), Nadia’s mother, who also has to grapple with significant mental health issues.
Literally transported back to various key periods in the life of her family by the 6622 train, Nadia finds herself with a mystery to solve, a family past to possibly fix and a fractured present sense to hopefully heal.
That’s a whole lot of narrative plates in the air, but Russian Doll, which also sends Alan on his own trip back to East Berlin in 1982 to meet his Ghanaian student grandmother, manages them to hold them all aloft and land them with elegant and affecting ease by the end of the seven episodes, which function, in effect, as the weirdest and most out there therapy session ever.
As you’d expect with a protagonist as vulnerably bold as Nadia, who might appear ballsy and in command but who worries about a great many things including the health and wellbeing of her much-loved godmother Ruthie (Elizabeth Ashley in the present, Annie Murphy in the past) who was more of a mother than Lenora ever managed, and show as willing to stretch reality as Russian Doll, it’s the therapy session to end all therapy sessions, infused with retro regrets, present day dislocation and a desperate quest to make bring the past and present together in far more pleasing form than is currently the case.
As with many time travel shows, Russian Doll season 2 takes a particular stance on what can or can’t be done “Butterfly Effect”-ing in the past, and while that can’t be divulged without once again upsetting the spoiler applecart, it does have a huge effect on what happens to Nadia throughout the seven perfectly-judged and poignancy-infused episodes.
One of the great gifts of Russian Doll, apart from Lyonne herself and the show’s for extraordinarily imaginative premises and always satisfying of its underpinning ideas, is that it’s big, epic scope is always matched, heartbeat for multiversal twist-and-turn, with a rough, raw intimacy that leaves you gsping with emotional recognition.
The show is also damn funny too, thanks to Lyonne’s gift for meaningfully comedic delivery that is as hilarious as it soul searing, but also to supporting players like Ruthie and wacky artist Maxine (Great Lee), leavening out some pretty big issues, including this time around the Holocaust, with empathy, understanding and accessibly broken humanity.
That is the great strength of Russian Doll – it is funny enough to make you feel as if you’re in deep but not drowning but also serious enough that you can feel like somehow is digging hard into your soul without ever feeling like you’ll never surface again.
It’s able to, every step of the subway training way, be both the most incisively human thing you’ve ever seen and the most intelligently funny, a rare balancing act that always stays perfectly taut and never less than captivating.
While you might argue that season 1 was marginally more creative, original and out there, season 2 of Russian Doll is nevertheless brilliantly goo, immensely affecting but humourous storytelling, building on the opening season with skill, confidence and a rare appreciation for how we all want to go back and fix the pain but that life, even when it breaks the rules, and honestly time travel’s right up there with chronological orthodoxy snapping, may not necessarily be so accommodating and maybe, just maybe, we just have to make our peace with our broken present and see where that takes us,